Satisfying Dungeons With Fast Card Battles

Fairy Tail: Dungeon offers a quick, engaging roguelite deck-building experience for those looking for a few quick games with high-stakes cards. Incredibly simple, but with a great deal of depth in the system that you can quickly grasp, this game is great fun whether you only have a few minutes to play or want to spend a lot of time in the game’s dungeons.

Be a person without anime knowledgeThe game provides a quick introduction to some of the characters that feels like just enough to get you started. I was worried that I would be completely lost after some of the recent anime games I’ve played where I didn’t know the show, but this one really doesn’t require you to know much. It gives you a few playable characters (as well as some other characters you meet), but all you really need to know is their playstyles and how they fight. Since the game has a light story, you don’t feel like you’re losing anything by not knowing the show and you still feel like you “get” everything that’s going on. That said, the game has an extremely light story, but I didn’t find myself needing a story.

Instead, I focused more on card games. Fairy Tail: DungeonYou will be given a small deck of cards to play with at first. You will be given a mix of attack cards that damage enemies as well as defense cards that block incoming damage. These cards are dealt to you four at a time and you will start each round with a full four cards. You are given three MP each round that you can use and you get to decide how to spend that MP with your cards (most cost one or two MP to roll).

As for what you should do with your MP each turn, it depends on what your enemies are doing. The game will indicate some damage numbers next to the monster if they are going to attack you. If they are not, you can select an enemy to find out what kind of defense or power-up spell they might be casting instead. Enemies can also prepare high-damage attacks that come with unique ways to block them (like playing X number of attack cards). Knowing everything your opponent is doing will help guide you on what you should do each round.

And while you only have four cards to choose from each round, you feel like you really have to think about what to play—you’ll have a lot of headaches with that simple hand. Should you go defensive? Try to kill something before it hits you? Prioritize playing the right card to block and land a big hit (do this all the time)? Your health points persist in the dungeon, so you can’t just make a mistake in one fight and then heal up. Mistakes pile up, and if you take too much damage in multiple fights, you’re back to square one. Fairy Tail: Dungeon.

However, you’ll quickly get frustrated. With only a few cards to play, things move quickly throughout the game. You can only do so much with each hand, so things move very quickly. You can take a moment to draw a card if it’s completely useless, but you’ll generally want to play what you have. This means that you don’t usually have to spend too much time making decisions, but it still feels like there’s a lot of depth to each round despite the small hand size.

The real depth lies in building your deck and planning out the abilities you want to have in it. Fairy Tail: Dungeon. As you explore the dungeon map by selecting a tile to visit, you can pick up cards from battles, events you might stumble upon, or shops that appear. Now, I loaded my deck with high damage cards whenever I came across one, and while that worked well for a while, it eventually meant that my defensive cards didn’t come up as much when I fought simply because I had more offensive cards in my deck. It was a completely possible occurrence that I foolishly ignored in the hopes of just smashing enemies. It’s not that playing more defensively helped me get further a few rounds later. However, I do like that I have to consider how I arrange my deck for the possibility.

And there are a number of ways you can shape your deck. You can improve some of your abilities in combat or add better abilities to specific cards using an upgrade system that costs Lacrima, a currency you pick up as you play. You can also outright reject some of the cards you’re offered, as well as prune a card from your deck at certain times. After a while, I found it easier to discard cards, decline to take them if I felt like I had too many high-cost cards, or focus on just improving what I had to know better what to expect in each hand rather than constantly expanding and ruining the predictability of getting the cards I wanted.

There are some cool things that might make you want to actually get that new card, though. Some cards can play together to create an improvement effect (Magic Chains), so you’ll want to make sure you get them often. But is adding a new chain worth it if it bloats your deck? Plus, you might unlock a new chain in your upgrade tree that you’ll wish you’d picked up a card for sooner. That’s something I think about a lot when I’m sitting around deciding whether or not to get a card.

How you stack that deck also depends on the character you use in the Fairy Tail: Dungeon. Natsu plays offensively but is still a more well-rounded player, but Gray plays more defensively, accumulating a large amount of protection against damage. Lucy provides some additional buffs and support. The playable characters offer some interesting options for how to play and build your deck, and all of their abilities look very different, adding some visual beauty and variety.

You also have a lot of room to maneuver in the map-based gameplay. Not every tile you reach is an encounter. There are tiles that allow you to meet other characters and have events, tiles with Lacrima on them, and even shops. You can only see so far ahead, so you can’t fully plan your route, but you can aim for paths with fewer fights to save your life (or more if you want better rewards). How you move is as important as how you play your cards.

And when you die (and I died a lot), you get points to level up and unlock amulets for future runs. These rarely give huge rewards, but can give you a little health boost, the ability to get free cards, the ability to carry more items (being limited gear can also give you some nice effects), etc. They don’t really break the game so I never felt like I was gaining overwhelming power, but enough to get a little advantage here and there.

Fairy Tail: Dungeon feels like a simple deck-building game but still has good strategy. Being able to play a few quick hands in a battle is great for times when you don’t have a lot of time to play, and the ability to dive right in and learn the rules in seconds makes it easy to jump right in. Even so, the underlying systems have enough depth that it keeps pulling me back in to reshape my strategies for the next run.

Fairy Tail: Dungeon available for ComputerS.

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